In Focus: Alvaro Ybarra Zavala’s “Apocalypse”

Alvaro Ybarra Zavala, a young Spanish photographer, came by our office on Monday; he struck me as serious and deeply humble. When congratulated on the Overseas Press Club award that he received last week, he replied, “It’s not about me. It’s just a good excuse to speak about the issue.” The issue in that case was the political violence and dangerous underworld in Venezuela. But that work doesn’t even figure into his fifth book, “Apocalypse,” which confronts us with the horror that humans are capable of inflicting upon one another, in Afghanistan, Burma, Colombia, Darfur, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Iraq—and that’s just in the past decade.

In the introduction, Aidan Sullivan writes that Zavala strives “to stir a public that has become, if not immune, then insulated and protected by the media’s constant barrage of manufactured beauty … acting as a buffer to reality.” And asks, “Is there still room to stimulate a conscience?” For Zavala, there is; he strives to lift the veil and record a history that must not be forgotten; speaking of his subjects, he says: “I want them to be remembered, that’s what motivates me.”

A guerrilla from the Sudanese Liberation Army, one of the rebel groups fighting against the government, in Khartoum, 2005. “I always wondered who was sitting in the passenger seat,” Zavala wrote in an e-mail. “Death and human rights violations were part of daily life for civilians in Darfur. It’s hard to believe that after Rwanda, the Balkans, the international community didn’t do anything to stop the killings. Hard to believe that we keep repeating the same mistakes.”

Whitney Johnson was the director of photography at The New Yorker from 2011 to 2015.